By: Ben Wolfson, Ph.D.

Source: Pixabay

Last month, a Pentagon research program called Insect Allies burst into the public conversation after a team of research scientists and legal scholars published an article detailing their concerns and critiques of the project in Science magazine. Insect Allies is run by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and was announced in 2016 with the stated goal of “pursuing scalable, readily deployable, and generalizable countermeasures against potential natural and engineered threats to the food supply with the goals of preserving the U.S. crop system”. As indicated by its eponymous project name, the Insect Allies research program seeks to develop insects that carry gene editing viruses, allowing for rapid genetic modification of plant food sources. The Insect Allies program exemplifies both the pros and cons of DARPA work. The described project leapfrogs current technological paradigms, promoting a next stage of synthetic…